


putting out fire (with gasoline)

by steelplatedhearts



Series: War Paint and Cyanide Pills [1]
Category: Inglourious Basterds (2009), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Blood, Post-Movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-28
Updated: 2012-11-28
Packaged: 2017-11-19 17:54:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/576021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/steelplatedhearts/pseuds/steelplatedhearts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life has clung to Silva yet again, and while laying low, he meets a woman called Shosanna Dreyfus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	putting out fire (with gasoline)

**Author's Note:**

> I...have no excuses for this. No idea where it came from. I just thought, hey, wouldn't it be cool if these two hung out?

They stop for a drink one night, in some crowded, dingy bar in a town where people go to die, and Shosanna is inside for all of ten minutes before she breaks someone’s nose and is escorted out.

Silva stays and finishes his drink (which is absolute swill, but alcohol is alcohol), and then strolls outside to where Shosanna is sitting in the car, quietly fuming.

He quirks an eyebrow at her, and she rolls her eyes. “I’m not nice to people that hit on me anymore,” she says. “I learned my lesson.”

“I think I prefer your method of dealing with them,” he says cheerfully, lighting up a cigarette. “You know, we could probably burn the world down, with methods like that.”

She starts the car, the ghost of a smile on her face. “Promises, promises.”

*   *   *   *   *

He gets bored one evening, and decides to hack into the CIA mainframe, if for no other reason to get his hand back in the game.

He’s leading some hopeless tech in a merry chase around their security systems when Shosanna notices what he’s doing. She immediately slams the laptop shut and stuffs it in a nearby drawer. He goes for his gun, but she has a knife at his throat almost before he can blink.

“You’re going to get us caught and killed,” she hisses, eyes flashing.

“I’m just having some fun,” he says, grinning. She scoffs.

“You’re _drawing attention to us,”_ she says. “Could you _not_?”

“If it means so much to you, darling,” he drawls, and she calls him something nasty in French (he thinks it might be “scum-sucking pig” but his French is a bit rusty) and puts the knife away.

She spends the rest of the night glaring at him, still suspicious. He ignores her, watching How I Met Your Mother on the tiny motel TV and laughing along.

She falls asleep around 2 am, and he then proceeds to crash the entire CIA computer system, because he can.

*   *   *   *   *

Bond thinks he is dead, which is probably for the best.

Bond himself was always insignificant in the grand scheme of things, anyway. It was Her, only ever Her that mattered. And now, She is dead.

He’d wanted to die too, for a while.

He almost had. But Bond didn’t really seem to understand the whole “life clung to me like a disease” bit (Silva suspected that, despite his training, Bond was not all that bright) and just left his body there, bleeding, knife still stuck in his back.

He was there for a long time. He’s not sure how long.

But, eventually, he regained enough strength to yank the knife out and somehow walk until he found shelter. He healed, recovered, and started to wander around Europe, purposeless.

He’s—well, he doesn’t quite know where he is anymore, but it’s definitely a city, one with cramped streets, buildings leaning together and crowding out the air. It’s a hopeless sort of city, where nobody expects good things to happen to them.

So of course, he adores it there.

He’s roaming the streets one day when he sees a woman being kicked out of a hotel, leaving a trail of black eyes and bloody noses behind her. She’s swearing very loudly, and the burly men twice her size look like they’re about to wet themselves in fear.

The crowd clears out, and she and Silva are the only ones left on the street. She fumbles with her keys, muttering to herself, when she notices him.

“What the fuck are you looking at?” she snarls. He likes her attitude, so he takes a chance.

“I blew up MI6 a while back,” he says, leaning against a lamppost.

She raises her eyebrow. “That was you? I’m impressed.” She stops messing with her keys and props her arm up on her car. “Aren’t you supposed to be dead, then?”

He shrugs. “I like to make a hobby of resurrection.”

*   *   *   *   *

He only ever kisses her once.

They’re still in the early stages, still touchy about their personal habits. It’s difficult for either of them to compromise. She’s constantly bristling, he’s constantly irritating.

But at the same time, she’s beautiful in her ever-present, all-encompassing anger, so one night outside the motel room he leans over and kisses her, because why not?

She makes a small noise of surprise, and then deepens the kiss.

And then she bites him.

He yelps, mouth filling up with blood as she shoves him away. “Try that again,” she says, glaring daggers at him, “and I’ll rip your balls off.”

Oddly enough, that’s when he knows that this partnership is going to work out just fine.

*   *   *   *   *

They work out a routine, eventually. They drive around during the day, find motels at night, and every few weeks, they find someone who won’t be missed and rip him apart.

(Sometimes this is a metaphor. Sometimes it is not.)

They do not talk about their pasts. Well, Shosanna doesn’t, at least (Silva talks about his all the time). The most he’s been able to figure out about Shosanna is that a) everyone she’s ever known is dead, and b) somewhere along the line she developed a taste for blood.

He would like to know more, but it’s enough for now.

At night, she likes to curl up on the couch and watch old black-and-white movies. Sometimes, the actresses resemble what Silva imagines She looked like in Her heyday, before Hong Kong and MI6. If he gets twitchy when those particular actresses are on screen, Shosanna does not comment.

She notices though, he thinks. Sometimes he can see her smirking out of the corner of his eyes.

He generally ignores her, then.

*   *   *   *   *

It is a shame, he thinks, that she’s never been through 00 training. She’d be good at it—good as Bond, yes, but not quite as good as him. Nobody is ever as good as him.

She’d come close, though.

As far as he can tell, she’s had to teach herself the art of pain. If she’d had a teacher—if She had taught Shosanna—

Well. She would definitely be one of the last two rats.

He’s taken to calling her _mi ratita_ , and the words drip off his tongue as naturally as _mi corazón_ would to someone more normal.

She does not like being called _ratita_. She hits him every time he does it, in hopes that she can train him out of the habit. However, it only renews his determination.

She calls him _trou du cul_ and _connasse_. “Such harsh words, _mi ratita_ ,” he says with a smile as she snarls at him. “One would almost think you don’t like me.”

“I _don’t_ like you,” she says, eyes narrowed. “You’re a complete douchebag.”

“Watch out for the pedestrians,” he says placidly, and she swerves to avoid them, but not that far. She does enjoy scaring people, after all.

 *   *   *   *   *

She gets restless first, which only makes sense. After all, she can’t crash satellites in her spare time like he can (and does.)

“What’s wrong, _mi ratita_?” he asks her one day, blood from their latest kill still fresh on his nice white jacket. She’s crouching down, staring at the body with an almost melancholy look on her face.

At his words, she rolls her eyes and hits him, which is about what he expected. But then, she stares at the body again.

“This used to mean something,” she says, rolling the corpse over with a kick of her foot. “I used to kill very bad people who did not deserve to live. Now, I do _this_.”

“What’s wrong with _this_?” he says, hands on his hips.

“There’s no elegance in it, no _vengeance_ ,” she says, trying to wipe the blood off her face. Instead, it smears, a bright red streak across her forehead.

Vengeance is something he can understand, so this is a problem that he can easily fix.

*   *   *   *   *

Shosanna goes out to get her nails done weekly—her one small indulgence. Her preferred color looks like dried blood (Silva approves), and she likes to keep it maintained.

When she comes back to the motel, Silva is ready. She opens the door, and stops short.

“Raoul.”

“Yes, _ratita_?”

“What’s this?”

“Ah, yes,” he says, turning to grin at her. “This is a present.”

The ‘present’ is a man, bound and gagged, lying in the middle of the room.

“Some present,” Shosanna says, but Silva can tell she’s intrigued.

“It’s a very nice present,” he assures her, slipping his arms around her waist and resting his chin on her shoulder. “Because _this_ present is a very bad man.”

“Oh?” she says, making no move to push him away, which is a good sign.

“He beats his wife,” he says, speaking directly into her ear, voice low. “His whole family, really. It’s quite terrible.”

“Mm.”

“And he parks in handicapped spots,” he continues, lips curling up into a smile. “And he cheats on his taxes.”

“Does he really do all that?” she asks, trying to keep the glee out of her voice and remain skeptical.

(She fails.)

“Well,” Silva admits, “I made up the part about the taxes.” He steps to the side, gesturing to the man with a flourish. “He’s all yours, _ratita_.”

He’s curious to see what she’ll do with him, given total freedom.

She rummages around in the bag of weapons they keep in the room and produces a baseball bat. He raises his eyebrows at her, and she gives him a wicked grin, eyes lit up. “There was a group of men back home that specialized in death by baseball bat.” She stops, considering. “Well, that and scalping. But the bat was famous.”

He files the information away, saving that gem for later.

She steps up to where the man is lying and pulls him sharply up so he’s kneeling. She walks around him in a circle, considering the angles and soft spots, ignoring his whimpering. Suddenly, she whips the bat back and drives it into the man’s skull.

Again and again, she slams the bat down, and his head is nothing but a pile of mush and goo and shattered bone by the time she’s done.

Silva flicks what looks like a piece of brain off of his jacket. “You’ve gone and ruined the carpet, you know.”

“This carpet was horrid, and you know it,” she smirks, twirling the bat. “I did this place a favor.”

He laughs, tipping his head back. “Good present?”

“Good present,” she says.

“Now what do you say?”

“Thank you, _salaud_ ,” she says, rolling her eyes.

“So ungrateful,” Silva laments, and Shosanna hits him

*   *   *   *   *

She lets him drive the car after that, her precious cherry-red Clio that she loves more than life itself. Once she settles down enough to stop glaring at him every time the speedometer goes over 60 km, she pulls out the baseball bat and a large knife.

She carves “Shosanna Dreyfus” in spiky letters down the side, the dried blood flaking off and drifting down to land by her feet.

“ _Bon_ ,” she says, regarding her handiwork with satisfaction. “This is a weapon that makes a statement.”

“Indeed it does, _ratita._ ”

“Stop calling me that, _connasse_.”

*   *   *   *   * 

“You love me, don’t you, _ratita_?”

“No.”

He sighs. “Such cruelty.”

“Cut the crap and tell me what you want,” she says, swerving around a pothole.

“You’re enjoying killing bad men, aren’t you?”

“Keep this up and I’ll kill another bad man right now,” she says, glaring at him.

“Well, I enjoy things on a grand scale the way you enjoy killing bad men,” he says, ignoring her. “All this miniscule, ordinary human drama—it doesn’t _interest_ me at all, _ratita_.”

“So what do you have in mind?” she asks.

“A bank. An art museum. An intelligence agency. Something _big_ ,” he says. “Something flashy.”

She snorts. “Why don’t you just go spray paint ‘Silva was here’ across the front of the Mona Lisa?” When he doesn’t immediately answer, she looks at him, alarmed. “I was joking, you can’t do that.”

“Why not?” he asks.

“Because you’re supposed to be _dead_ , Raoul,” she says, exasperated. “And I can’t think of a better way to let MI6 know you’re alive than spray painting your name on the most famous piece of artwork in the world.”

“Some other time, perhaps,” he says.

“ _No_.”

*   *   *   *   *

They settle on some gala for the rich and powerful, where some wealthy man is showing off a fabled lost diamond. Silva hacks his way into an invitation, and Shosanna spends two days assembling explosives, because if there’s one thing they both agree on, it’s that there’s no fun without a fire.

The day of the gala, Silva suits up in a pristine white tuxedo that Shosanna wrinkles her nose at. She herself is resplendent in a blood-red dress, and Silva thinks that they make a rather handsome pair.

The theft itself is rather simple—he disables the alarms and she drops the stone into her purse. When the theft is noticed, there’s a large hue and cry, and talk of searching the guests, but Shosanna sets off the bombs and they’re able to slip out unnoticed.

“That was almost too easy,” Shosanna says as they watch the blaze from a nearby rooftop.

“Ah, but it has paved the way for greater things,” he says.

“What will we do with the diamond?” she asks, staring into his glittering depths.

“Sell it? Throw it into the Seine? Who cares? What matters, _mi ratita,_ is that people are on alert again. They’re worried, and scared, and there’s just so much one can do with fear.”

*   *   *   *   *

They throw the diamond into the Thames, near the MI6 headquarters. There’s barely even a splash, and he takes her hand as it sinks beneath the water.

“We’re going to burn this world to the ground, _ratita_ ,” he says, staring at the MI6 building.

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” she murmurs.

“It’s not a promise,” he says. “It’s a guarantee.”


End file.
